Lawrence Durrell

Highlights from the Archives

Time was the grand theme of the Alexandrian novels, but time has not been kind in return. Thirty years ago, nobody doubted that the Quartet was Durrell's most remarkable achievement, eminently deserving of the Nobel Prize it failed to win him. In the austere climate of postwar fiction, Durrell's novels seemed as intoxicating and sensuous as a bathtub of gardenia petals; now, the Quartet seems antiquated and over-written, a literary curiosity, the British Empire's last gasp.

Lawrence Durrell, the British novelist and poet whose sensuous and exotic fiction, especially in the "Alexandria Quartet" novels, made him a sort of prophet of the sexual revolution of the 1960's, died Wednesday at his home in Sommieres, France. He was 78 years old.

Henry Miller and Lawrence Durrell: These men loved each other, and they loved being alive together. Well into their 60's and 80's, respectively, each one relished undiminished appetite in himself and in the other. That, chiefly, is the subject of this 45-year correspondence. Energy: the celebration of its existence, and the mutual encouragement to go on generating it.

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Documents newly released by the Swedish Academy reveal that its members were generally dissatisfied with the candidates for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1962, when the prize was awarded to John Steinbeck.

This mountainside village epitomizes much that has drawn people to the Mediterranean since time immemorial. The air is fresh and fragrant, the people warm-hearted, and in the distance, beyond citrus groves and the majestic ruins of a Gothic abbey,...

A Daughter's Intimations After a legal battle with the family of Lawrence Durrell, the British literary quarterly Granta is about to publish extracts from the journals of his daughter Sappho, in which she intimates that she had an incestuous...

To the Editor: Lawrence Durrell (obituary, Nov. 9) possessed a rare talent and a rare sweetness in dealing with people, even strangers. In the spring of 1976, we were living in Ireland and were feeling a strong need for sunshine. I spotted a...

November 21, 1990, Wednesday

Lawrence Durrell, the British novelist and poet whose sensuous and exotic fiction, especially in the "Alexandria Quartet" novels, made him a sort of prophet of the sexual revolution of the 1960's, died Wednesday at his home in Sommieres, France. He...